Air Canada passenger flight helped locate a distressed yacht off Australian coast

Australian authorities are thanking the crew of an Air Canada flight for helping to locate a sailor in distress off the country’s east coast.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said Tuesday it received an emergency beacon activation at 8:15 a.m. local time, coming from approximately 270 nautical miles (500 kilometres) east of Sydney.

The AMSA requested Air Canada Flight AC033, a Boeing 777 en route from Vancouver to Sydney with 270 passengers and 18 crew aboard, to divert to the area of the beacon.

Capt. Andrew Robertson, of Vancouver, who was piloting the Air Canada flight, says he was contacted by Australian air traffic control and asked to help.

There’s a ship, a yacht in distress, may have sunk, and you are the closest aircraft. Would you be able to assist,” was the message Robertson said he received.

He asked for the location of the boat so that he and his crew could determine if they had the fuel to search for the boat in distress.

“Once we’d put that into our computer … we actually determined that we had the fuel,” Robertson said.

Read the full article here. It was nice to see that the passengers were cool with it.